Existing comment:
History in the Making:
One hundred years ago, the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, otherwise known as the Armory Show, took America by storm. Within the course of a year, the exhibition's co-organizers -- Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach of the American Association of Painters and Sculptors -- secured more than 1,200 loans by nearly 300 artists for the New York exhibition, with American art forming two-thirds of the overall presentation. While American audiences had been exposed to Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, and other European vanguard artists through Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 in New York, the highly publicized Armory Show catapulted the European avant-garde into the national spotlight while simultaneously securing recognition for its progressive American counterparts.
Duncan Phillips, who later founded The Phillips Collection, was among the more than 100,000 people who flocked to see the Armory Show at New York's 69th Regiment Armory. Seen through an impressionable 26-year-old's eyes, the radical abstract tendencies in art on vivid display in the work of Matisse, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and the cubists were not only baffling but "ridiculous. Phillips set down his reaction in a biting review published in International Studio later that year. However, by the end of the following decade, after an intense period of collecting, studying, and looking at art, Phillip's aesthetic sensibilities had matured to such an extent that many of the artists whom he had once rejected in the Armory Show had found their way into his own museum of modern art. Phillips wisely noted in 1927: "I have in due time graduated to a sharpened consciousness of the need for understanding the artist's methods, and the even greater need for an open door of the mind to many different kinds of aesthetic expression."
This installation, drawn from the museum's permanent collection and archives, celebrates the legacy of the Armory Show on Duncan Phillip's evolution as a collector, critic, and champion of modern art. Though not a re-creation, it brings together works by several of the leading artists, old and new, European and American, who captured Phillip's imagination in the years after the watershed 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.
"As I write, the air of studios in New York is charged with much talk about painting, talk that is full of fanaticism and mystification and real concern for the future of art... an International Exhibition of Modern Art quite stupefying in its vulgarity."
-- Duncan Phillips, "Revolution and Reactions in Painting," 1913 |